On the Use of CGI in Michael Snow's *Corpus Callosum

The Child in the Machine: On the Use of CGI in Michael Snow’s *Corpus Callosum

MALCOLM TURVEY

The most highly developed earthly man is very like the child. —Novalis

There’s a fashionable idea now, especially among academic theorists, that the person—the subject, as they say these days—is totally culturally shaped. I don’t believe that at all. I think somebody is born, that there is an organism that has functions. It can be twisted; it can be hurt; but there’s still a speciﬁc person there. —Michael Snow

Elsewhere, I have suggested that Michael Snow’s experimentation with computer-generated imagery (CGI) in *Corpus Callosum (2002) returns to and extends some of the cinema’s earliest traditions.1 In particular, Snow’s film shares a sensibility with experimental film of the 1910s and 1920s, what Annette Michelson describes as a euphoric sense of “ludic sovereignty” over space and time.2 Just as a filmmaker such as Dziga Vertov self-consciously revels in his films in what was then the novel power over time granted by film, so Snow just as self- consciously revels in *Corpus Callosum in the new power over space enabled by digital, thereby suggesting that, for all of its novelty, the use of digital technologies in filmmaking will be driven by some of the same basic drives and desires that have motivated much cinematic art over the last one hundred or so years, such as the desire for control over space and time. Experimental film of the 1910s and 1920s is not the only cinematic tradition that *Corpus Callosum returns to and extends. As other commentators have noted, its use of CGI to comically manipulate the human body bears more than a passing resemblance to one of the cinema’s earliest forms of entertainment, slapstick comedy, which emerged during the cinema’s first period, the so-called cinema of attractions (1896–1904).

1. “Dr. Tube and Mr. Snow,” Millennium Film Journal 43–44 (Summer 2005). I have occasionally bor- rowed an odd sentence or two from this article. 2. Annette Michelson, “The Wings of Hypothesis: On Montage and the Theory of the Interval,” in

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The word “slapstick,” as Alan Dale reminds us, derives from an implement—“the double paddles formerly used by cir- cus clowns to beat each other. The loud crack of the two paddle blades as they crashed together could always be depended upon to produce the laughter and applause.” . . . For comedy to register as slapstick, you need only the fall, and its flipside, the blow. . . . The essence of a slapstick gag is a physical assault on, or collapse of, the hero’s dignity.3 In Snow’s film, literal falls and blows performed by his actors are blended with a variety of computer-generated ones that assault the dignity of the human body and are accompanied on the soundtrack by electronic equivalents of the crack of the slapstick paddle. Once inside the office in which most of the film takes place, there begins a series of slow tracking shots edited together into a continuous loop, with the camera repeatedly tracking across the space of the office from left to right, starting and stopping each time in roughly the same places. During each track, one or more computer-generated assaults on the body occur along with various electronic noises. In the first, the foot of a worker becomes stuck to the ground; in the second (which is reminiscent of the sight gags about race in silent slapstick), a white man hands some papers to a black coworker—slowly the black man turns white as the white man turns black; in the third, an electric current leaps out of a computer, electrifying a group of workers who fall to the ground—one of

Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942, ed. Matthew Teitelbaum (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), p. 65. 3. Alan Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 1, 3.

Above and facing page: Michael Snow. *Corpus Callosum. 2002. Courtesy the artist and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

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them then performs a partial handstand as if still electrified; and in the fifth, the image is twisted in the middle, like a bow tie, turning it upside down, with a woman, also upside-down, lying unconscious on the floor. The assault intensifies in a second series of tracks, and is given a more explicitly sexual and sadistic inflection. As the camera passes a man, his penis expands from the fly of his trousers across the width of the office until it meets the exposed arse of a woman waiting, doggy-style, on top of a desk—a bell rings and the penis suddenly contracts as the woman is returned in fast motion to her seat. A man grabs and begins twisting the arm of another man; the action is then enhanced by some digital twisting, first of the twisted arm, then of the man’s entire body. The first man then proceeds to whip the second with his belt before they part, blowing kisses to each other. The body of a plump woman is expanded across the width of the office until, like a balloon, it bursts. A man and a woman enter the door of a bathroom and are squeezed together—when they emerge, they are still squeezed together in the rectangular shape of the doorway as they awkwardly shuffle back to the office. As these examples suggest, Snow uses CGI in his film to expand, contract, twist, squeeze, fold, invert, transform, and in general wreak havoc on the human body. Although it does not have a narrative, *Corpus Callosum also employs some of the conventions of comedian comedy, which took shape as slapstick evolved into the longer, narrative chase films and one- and two-reelers of the later 1900s and 1910s. These conventions were extended further in animated films and are still used today in comedian comedy and cartoons. As Steve Seidman has shown in his seminal study of the genre, one of its major conventions is what he calls its “extrafictionality,” the foregrounding of film’s artificiality through a variety of

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means such as exposing “the materiality of sound and image.”4 To t ake one of any number of possible examples from the genre’s history, in Laurel and Hardy’s parodic Western Way Out West (1937), the boys are in a bar when a cowboy begins to sing. They chime in, too, and all goes well until the diminutive Laurel suddenly starts harmonizing in the implausibly low bass voice of a large man. Hardy, confounded, borrows a wooden mallet from the bartender and hits Laurel on the head. But rather than stop, Laurel continues singing, this time in the equally implausible falsetto voice of a woman, before finally fainting. This scene exposes the materiality of the soundtrack not only by overtly dubbing the voices of a man and woman onto Laurel’s, but also by having Hardy explicitly call attention to the dubbing from within the film’s diegesis. The scene also exemplifies another way in which comedian comedy films foreground their artificiality. Rather than act as if the viewer does not exist and the fictional world of the film is real, as is the norm in most genres, comedians tend to acknowledge the viewer’s existence. When Laurel begins to sing in that impossibly bass voice, Hardy, as was his cus- tom, looks into the camera at the viewer with a mixture of bewilderment and

4. Steve Seidman, Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film (Ann Arbor, MI.: UMI Research Press, 1981), p. 35.

Laurel and Hardy. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives.

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frustration.5 Other comedians talk to the viewer, such as Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers (1930), who heaps abuse on Margaret Dumont’s character Mrs. Rittenhouse in various asides to the camera. A final convention of the genre worth mentioning in the context of Snow’s film is the way it traffics in what Seidman calls “identity confusion.” Comedians are often confused with, or disguised as, others, taking on aspects of their identities, and comedian comedy is replete with doubles. For instance, Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor (1963) plays both Professor Julius Kelp and his alter-ego, Buddy Love. This convention has been enhanced by CGI in recent films such as The Mask (1994), in which Jim Carey plays nice, conventional Stanley, whose repressed Id is liberated when he is digitally transformed by a magi- cal mask into an anarchic trickster. And in Being John Malkovich (1999), Mr. Malkovich is digitally duplicated ad infinitum. All of these conventions are evident in *Corpus Callosum. To start with, the film foregrounds its artificiality because Snow usually makes no effort to hide his computer-generated effects. As other commentators have noted, many of the digital manipulations Snow employs are overt, even crude. They are not, for the most part, blended seamlessly with the recorded elements of the shot in which they occur, as they typically are in mainstream narrative films. Take, for example, the expanding penis, which in its absurd size and flatness is clearly computer-generated, as are the rectangular couple and the men who change color. Then there are the repeated acknowledgments of the viewer by the actors who often look into the camera. At one point, one of the workers is sitting at his computer monitor, on which there appear to be several dials. The man proceeds to move his mouse and manipulate the dials on his monitor, all the while glancing up at the camera, as if to suggest that he is controlling the effects we begin to see—the image turns different colors, a man in a wheelchair rolls over it, it dissolves into TV static, and so on. Snow also has great fun with digital’s capacity to confuse identities. To take one of numerous examples, there is a blonde woman in a brown skirt, pink shirt, white tights, and brown shoes carrying a purse whom we see throughout the film. However, she is played by different actresses at different times (including a young girl), and at one point she appears naked and pregnant. Later, we see her, naked again, but this time she is not pregnant and has a penis. For once, no digital trickery is obvious—her penis blends seamlessly with the rest of her body. Snow is here using CGI in conjunction with multiple actresses to create the kind of identity confusion that is a hallmark of comedian comedy. Considering all of the ways he could have explored the novel possibilities of CGI, why would Snow have chosen to do so through a slapstick assault on the dignity of the human body and the conventions of comedian comedy and animation? Why would he experiment with this new, advanced technology by returning to one of the cinema’s earliest genres? In order to answer this question, we would do well to recall that, for some, there is a profound kinship between comedy and experimental film. 5. Charles Barr catalogs the wide variety of Hardy’s looks into the camera in his wonderful book Laurel & Hardy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).

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Snow. *Corpus Callosum. 2002. Courtesy Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Living room (top) and ofﬁce (bottom); blonde woman played by two different actresses.

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Filmmaker Sidney Peterson goes as far as to claim that “90 percent of all experimental work is . . . in its very nature comical,” that there is an “element of comedy” in the film medium itself, and that “the best introductions” to experimental film are “silent comedies,” “not the works of Ford, Eisenstein, or De Mille.”6 Furthermore, Snow is not, of course, the first experimental filmmaker to employ slapstick. Francis Picabia and René Clair’s Dadaist film Entr’acte (1923) is widely seen as indebted to slapstick in its chase scene as well as its comic manipulation of the human body through overtly artificial techniques such as slow and stop motion.7 And after World War II, Peterson, along with James Broughton, introduced slapstick into North American experimental filmmaking in The Potted Psalm (1946), and each continued to pursue it, in different ways, in subsequent films. Why would these filmmakers gravitate toward slapstick and comedy in making experimental works? An answer, I think, is provided by Stan Brakhage, who, in writing of Chaplin, argues that the artist must “opt, in oneself, totally for the world of the Child. . . . In moments, this happens in Chaplin’s work—in the stances, usually, of Dance . . . and/or Dream.”8 The comedian, especially the slapstick comedian, has often been associated with the child, and the way the comedian behaves is often thought of as childlike. As Seidman puts it, in addition to identity confusion, Another grouping of recurring formal elements can be discerned in comedian comedy. These stress the comic figure’s childlike nature, his penchant toward play and imagination. In many of the films, the condition of childishness is foregrounded by verbal references to the comic figure as a child, or by the way the comic figure manifests certain childlike qualities. Moreover, certain comic figures demonstrate a childish approach to communication and self-expression, comprehension, and an unawareness of how their bodies function. Often, the physical unco- ordination of these comic figures leads to inadvertent destructive tendencies, even when they are trying to be helpful. Many films find the comic figure, like the child, being driven by principles of stimulation and pleasure, which lead to the manifestation of intentional destructive tendencies and sexual aggression.9 Once again Laurel and Hardy offer a good example. Laurel, in particular, is childlike, even infantile. He finds it difficult to grasp abstract ideas, metaphor, or anything beyond the concrete and literal. In Sons of the Desert (1933), he is incapable of understanding the subterfuge that Hardy is perpetrating on their wives in order to enable them to attend the Sons of the Desert convention in Chicago,

6. Sidney Peterson, “A Note on Comedy in Experimental Film” (1963), in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (1971; New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), pp. 402, 401, 400. 7. See, for example, P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943–2000 (1978; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 53. 8. Quoted in Marjorie Keller, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell, and Brakhage (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), p. 13. My emphasis. 9. Seidman, Comedian Comedy, p. 100.

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and he continually interprets idioms and other figurative forms of speech literally. When Hardy, trying to convince his wife to allow them to attend, meekly asserts, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” Laurel innocently asks, “Who’s Jack?” Like a child, Laurel also often cries when scared or unsure, such as when the Sons take an oath of allegiance that he feels he cannot uphold. However, none of this means that he is stupid. As children do, he often manipu- lates situations to his advantage, as in The Music Box (1932) when, in the final moments of delivering an oversized music box to a house on the top of a hill, he rides on the front of the box while Hardy does all the work pushing it up the hill from behind. He also occasionally shows childlike flashes of brilliance, suddenly speaking in implausibly sophisticated language. Hardy, meanwhile, considers himself to be an adult in complete control of his life, but this always proves to be an illusion. In Sons of the Desert, he has to ask his wife for permission to allow Laurel to visit, much like a child asking his mother if a friend can come over. And, like children, he and Laurel often play, sing, or dance together, usually cre- ating a mess in the process; at the end of The Music Box, they finally get the ruined music box inside the house and then proceed to destroy its living room while dancing. If Laurel is an infant just learning to speak and reason, Hardy is his older, pre-adolescent brother who precociously overestimates his powers. And theirs is just one of the many forms that the comedian’s childlike nature has taken in slapstick comedy. Given its association with the child, it is therefore not surprising that certain experimental filmmakers have gravitated toward slapstick. For a concern with the child and the childlike has played a major role in experimental filmmaking, as it has in Western art in general since the Romantic period. Indeed, it constitutes one of the great continuities (of many) between Romanticism and modernism (and postmodernism). The concept of the child that informed the work of the Romantics was, as is well known, one of original innocence. In the late eighteenth century, Rousseau rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin, arguing that nature, including human nature, is good, and that sin results from an estrangement from nature due to the corrupting influence of society. Because they have yet to be affected by society, children are born in a state of natural grace. This condition can be main- tained only through an education that nurtures the original nature of the child, rather than represses or deforms it. As Peter Coveney has shown in his careful study of the subject, Romantic poets took up these themes, developing them in various ways, and during the nineteenth century, they came to be popularized and, inevitably, vulgarized. By the end of the century, the conception of the child as innocent had become nothing more than a convenient vehicle for stagnating pathos, or, in so far as it remained active, a potent means for withdrawal, for regression away from the very problems it had been created to express. So that, at the turn of the century, the child needed emancipation . . . from the

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careless and very widely accepted falsification of the myth of its “innocent” nature.10 According to Coveney, this emancipation came in the form of Freud’s theory of childhood sexuality, the influence of which has been incalculable. Due to Freud’s conception of the child as libidinal and pleasure-seeking, argues Coveney, the myth of the child’s innocence was exploded at the beginning of the twentieth century, and there arose a new conception of the child as fundamentally amoral, neither good nor evil, but instead “malicious, cruel, tender, kind, painfully sensitive—and most often an amalgam of all these qualities.”11 It is this conception that informs the work of modernists such as Joyce, Woolf, and Lawrence, who capture the amoral reality of the child in all of its complexity. While Freud’s theory of childhood sexuality was undoubtedly hugely influen- tial, in truth the novel conception of the child that it helped engender was part of a new view of nature that arose in the late nineteenth century and began with Schopenhauer. Whereas for the Romantics, nature was a source of goodness and spiritual salvation, for Schopenhauer and his followers, nature, in Charles Taylor’s words, is “not a spiritual source of good. On the contrary, it is nothing but wild, blind, uncontrolled striving, never satisfied, incapable of satisfaction, driving us on, against all principles, law, morality, all standards of dignity, to an insatiable search for the unattainable.”12 In this view, nature is “a great reservoir of amoral force,” of self-perpetuating, de-spiritualized, anarchic energy which Schopenhauer called the Will. It is a concept that, as Taylor points out, “had an immense influence on the thought and art of late-nineteenth-century Europe: in Germany, Austria, also France, even Russia. Most of the great writers, composers, and thinkers were deeply affected by [it], imprinted with it: Wagner, Nietzsche, Mahler, Thomas Mann” and of course Freud, whose concept of the libido is one of its descendants (as is the Lacanian Real).13 But although their conception of nature was different, the post- Schopenhauerians tended to believe, like the Romantics, that society cuts us off from nature, and that it is necessary to reconnect to nature, whether to transcend, control, or even embrace it as the vital source of life and creativity. Thus, the nineteenth century bequeathed to the twentieth at least two promi- nent conceptions of nature and the child. The first, starting with Rousseau, saw nature as a source of goodness and spiritual salvation and the child as innocent, while the second, starting with Schopenhauer, viewed nature as a self-perpetuating, de-spiritualized, anarchic force, and the child as amoral. Many twentieth century artists have been influenced by one or both of these conceptions, and have continued to attempt, like the Romantics, to reconnect to nature by way of the child.

10. Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood (1957; Baltimore: Peregrine Books, 1967), p. 291. 11. Ibid., p. 306. 12. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 442. 13. Ibid., pp. 444–46.

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As Marjorie Keller has shown in her seminal work on the theme of childhood in avant-garde film, three such artists are Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, and Brakhage; she writes that all three “found childhood to be an inspiration and subject for their cinemas.”14 However, they conceived of the child differently. Cocteau and Cornell had “a relatively uncritical relationship to . . . the Romantic movement . . . Wordsworth’s depiction of the progressive loss of natural sympathy with the world from childhood on . . . is the model for the filmmakers’ sensibility.”15 Brakhage, meanwhile, “polemicized against their idealized vision of childhood,” leaning more toward what I have called the amoral conception of the child. “His appreciation of modernist poetics, his Freudian biases, and his own experience as a father belied the effect of Romanticism to some degree—reworking the theme of childhood, casting back the period of ‘innocence’ to the birth trauma, and including developed notions of sexuality in early childhood.”16 But it was an artist to whom Keller does not pay much attention, James Broughton, who was probably the first North American experimental filmmaker to combine an interest in the amoral child with the other themes I have been exploring here: slapstick, and a return to the cinema’s earliest traditions. As P. Adams Sitney argues: Broughton took cinema back to the time before the elaborate narra- tives of the early century in order to recapture the excitement of seeing and showing human bodies in action, apparitions, and sudden disap- pearances. . . . In his quest for the origins of the cinema it is natural that he would feel an affinity for slapstick comedy.17 According to Sitney, “the nostalgia for the origins of the cinema is fused in [Broughton’s] work with an ironic quest for the origin of his own psychic development” in childhood.18 Thus, in Broughton’s masterpiece Mother’s Day (1948), a group of adults behave as children, while their mother and father “play at being adults and act like children.”19 In his notes on the film, Broughton writes: In Mother’s Day I deliberately used adults acting as children, to evoke the sense of projecting oneself as an adult back into memory, to suggest the impossible borderline between when one is a child and when one is grown-up, and to implicate Mother in the world of the child fantasies as being, perhaps, the biggest child of them all—since she, in this case, has never freed herself from narcissistic daydreams.20 Slapstick emerges in the film in the incongruity between the adult bodies of the actors and their childlike behavior, just as it does in the case of Laurel and Hardy,

14. Keller, The Untutored Eye, p. 14. 15. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 16. Ibid. 17. Sitney, Visionary Film, pp. 72–73. 18. Ibid. 19. James Broughton, “Bioﬁlmography of James Broughton,” Film Culture 61 (1975), p. 74. 20. James Broughton, “Two Notes on Mother’s Day,” Film Culture 61 (1975), p. 76.

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The adult-children of Mother’s Day. James Broughton. 1948. Courtesy Anthology Film Archives. as well as in the use of stop motion to create sudden changes in costume and set- ting, appearing and disappearing characters, and various other types of ellipses. The children depicted in the ﬁlm are clearly of the amoral kind described by Coveney—“malicious, cruel, tender, kind, painfully sensitive”—rather than idealized innocents. While playful, they are also aggressive, throwing things at each other and pushing one another off a swing; sexual, drawing a naked woman and imitating adult rituals of courtship; and destructive, throwing their parents’ posses- sions out of a window. Childhood is also associated with narcissism in the person of the mother who is unable to move beyond her childhood fantasy of “loveliness.”21 Broughton continued exploring these themes in his later ﬁlms: slapstick in Loony Tom, The Happy Lover (1951), in which a Chaplinesque tramp “capers across a sunlit countryside making immediate and outrageous love to every woman he encoun- ters,”22 and the image of childhood in This Is It (1971), in which Broughton’s son Orion plays naked with a large red ball as an unseen voice reads a poem that paro- dies cosmological and epistemological aspirations.23

21. Broughton, “Bioﬁlmography of James Broughton,” p. 64. 22. Ibid., p. 84. 23. Sitney, Visionary Film, pp. 78–79.

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Michael Snow’s son also makes an appearance in in the living room sequences of *Corpus Callosum, sitting, usually very still, watching television on the couch, his bare feet sometimes propped up on the table in front of him. At one point, he blows a bubble with the piece of red gum that he is chewing and, through digital trickery, it expands and fills the entire screen, echoing, perhaps, Orion Broughton’s red ball. But on the whole he seems aloof from the digital mayhem around him, as the placement, size, shape, color, and identity of various people and objects in the living room are manipulated digitally in a variety of ways. Children also appear in this film in a sequence that is totally unlike any other. After a series of tracking shots through the office has come to an end, we cut to a bird’s-eye view of a classroom, in which a group of children are seated at their desks working on drawings of what appear to be pyramids. Suddenly, one of the children, yawning, looks up and notices the camera. She alerts her comrades, who proceed to build a pyramid of desks in order to reach it. A boy climbs up and, just as he reaches out to touch the camera, the sequence ends. But more than anything else, it is in Snow’s use of CGI to comically manipulate bodies that we sense the presence of a childlike consciousness. It is as if the filmmaker is a mischievous youngster who, having been given a new, powerful toy that allows him to alter the bodies of a group of tolerant if bemused adults trying to go about their work, is playfully experimenting with its functions, sponta- neously and somewhat inexpertly. More so than Broughton’s children, this child is aggressive, even sadistic, and seemingly oblivious to the embarrassment and discom- fort it causes as it knocks, twists, expands, contracts, and squashes the bodies of the

Snow. *Corpus Callosum. 2002. Snow’s son appears on couch (far right). Courtesy the artist and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

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unfortunates over whom it has been given control. And it is sexual, too, delighting in the toilet humor so typical of the (pre-)adolescent. Due to the electronic hum on the soundtrack, the self-perpetuating, anarchic energy associated with the amoral conception of nature seems to pulsate throughout this film, barely con- tained by the repetitive tracking shots and threatening to erupt at any moment to wreak havoc once again on the dignity of the human body. Why, to repeat the question one last time, would Snow experiment with CGI in this way? Unlike Broughton, I do not think that Snow is concerned with “an ironic quest for the origin of his own psychic development,” although his film is, perhaps, a quest for the origin of his own artistic development. For it ends with two of the office workers entering a screening room where they watch a film Snow made in 1956 while working for an animation company. In this short, black-and-white cartoon, the left leg of a simple human figure is increasingly stretched and twisted, while the person looks at the viewer and waves. This scene clearly anticipates Snow’s use of CGI in the rest of *Corpus Callosum and unearths its origins in this early part of his career.24 More profoundly, though, much like Annette Michelson who argues that the “ludic sovereignty” over space and time that experimental filmmakers of the 1920s and before reveled in is rooted in “our abiding infantile fantasy of omnipo- tence,”25 Snow’s film suggests that what motivates the use of even the most advanced technologies such as CGI are thoroughly infantile drives and desires, ones that have shaped cinematic art since its inception, including the desire to play with, and make fun of, the human body that lies at the heart of slapstick and its close cousin, animation. *Corpus Callosum, in other words, is a grand work of de-sublimation, revealing and reveling in the fundamental, enduring, primitive needs and wishes that, according to some, are sublimated in our most advanced art forms and technologies, and that persist, disguised, from childhood into adulthood. By returning to slapstick, one of the cinema’s earliest traditions, and extending it, uninterrupted, into the digital age, Snow’s film offers a salutary antidote to the often hysterical rhetoric of “rupture” and “revolution” that tends to predominate in the discourse on digital. As is often the case with powerful new technologies, digital is widely viewed as effecting a fundamental change in human existence. Steven Pinker is surely correct to argue that there persists, in our culture, a myth of “the blank slate,” “the idea that the human mind has no inherent structure and can be inscribed at will by society or ourselves.”26 Hence, when a powerful new technology comes along, because we assume that human beings are infinitely malleable, we are quick to believe that it will transform us beyond recognition. We fail to see, in other words, that whatever changes new technologies bring, they will continue to be shaped by the enduring drives and desires that are bequeathed to us by evolution—such as the

24. The continuity between this cartoon and CGI might also mean that Snow would concur with Lev Manovich’s view that CGI brings ﬁlmmaking closer to animation. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001). 25. Annette Michelson, “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System,” October 52 (Spring 1990), p. 23. My emphasis. 26. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 2.

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desire to play with, and make fun of, the human body so brilliantly explored in Snow’s film.27 Where Pinker is wrong, however, is in his caricature of modernism, which, he claims, denies the existence of human nature and has therefore given rise to art that has “stopped trying to appeal to the senses.”28 Interpreting literally Virginia Woolf’s famous claim that “In or about December 1910, human nature changed,” he writes: All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside. In painting, realistic depiction gave way to freakish distortions of shape and color and then to abstract grids, shapes, dribbles, splashes, and [blank canvases]. In literature, omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability were replaced by a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, sub- jective and disjointed narration, and difficult prose.29 The denial of human nature in modernism, charges Pinker, is partly to blame for the contemporary “decline and fall” of the arts and humanities.30 But while it is true that some postmodern artists and intellectuals have denied the existence of human nature to the point of absurdity, often in the name of a confused Leftist insistence on the the determining role of society in shaping human life that Pinker rightly criticizes, what Pinker, ironically, does not recognize is that the very artistic techniques he decries—“stream of consciousness” in fiction, the “freakish distortion of shape and color” in painting, both of which find their contemporary equivalent in Snow’s use of CGI—have been used by modernists in an attempt to depict or express aspects of an occluded human nature, particularly the nature of the child.31 In *Corpus Callosum, we find this modernist tradition alive and well, employed in such a way to suggest that there will be profound continuities between the cinematic and digital ages.*

27. On the evolutionary origins of play with the human body in art, see Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), esp. ch. 5. 28. Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 413. 29. Ibid., pp. 409–10. 30. Ibid., p. 411. 31. In A Darwinian Left (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 2000), Peter Singer argues persua- sively that the Left needs to revise its outdated view of the determining role of society in shaping human life and incorporate the insights of evolutionary psychology into its political program. On liter- ary modernism and the child, see Coveney, The Image of Childhood, ch. 12. On modernist painting and the child, see Jonathan Fineberg, The Innocent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). * Thanks to Annette Michelson, Lisa Pasquariello, and Federico Windhausen for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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